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Most of the business growth and business start-ups will leverage Linux and other so-called open source software projects. This time, though, “dot com” businesses will start and thrive in non-Silicon Valley locations providing a more widespread recovery to historically non-technical regions. Technical folk who’ve made the exodus from high cost, high tech areas of the country will spring up in lower cost locations to capitalize on their newfound frugality.

According to Steve Maddox, director of operations at AARNet, the mirror contains “most of the major public domain Unix software” available, including Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and FreeBSD. The mirror automatically downloads all updates to these systems – such that when systems within Australia’s academic community download an update, they download it from a local source.

Applications

I reviewed Shotwell 0.3 a month or so back (see here) and i found myself pleasantly surprised by its feature set, performance over-head and plain-ol’ usefulness. Not being particularly enamoured by Ubuntu’s current default photo organizer, ‘F-Spot’, Shotwell presents itself as an inevitable successor in my book.

Whilst there are issues with it from a “mum-proof” perspective (Those floating windows are annoying and unnecessary – see the new gThumb for in-app editing windows done oh-so-right!), Shotwell nonetheless bags itself a place in my top 12 applications of 2009 out of sheer potential.

I’ve recently come across the application Blogilo, which I from here on out will reference as the Blog Gigolo. Most of my blog posts I do in the wordpress backend, in a web browser since it’s what I knew.

Instructionals

While you weren’t looking, the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution changed several features under the hood. Kyle Rankin, coauthor of The Official Ubuntu Server Book, points out the most distressing changes and explains why you need to suffer through them and ultimately come to acceptance.

Those who favour “convenience” and “simplicity” over security and Freedom, need not apply.

Like nearly every other distro out there, mine will be initially based off another. In this case, I’m going to start with the source RPMS from Fedora 12, rebuilt to be i386 compatible, and then it’ll slowly diverge from there. Ultimately it will use Alexandre Oliva’s linux-libre, the blob-free version of Linux, with the longer-term goal of possibly even moving to the GNU Hurd, at which point I’ll take great pleasure it telling Linus “Microsoft hatred is a disease” Torvalds where to shove “his” kernel, along with those other things he endorses, like Tivoization. It’ll have a strict “No Microsoft” policy, both in terms of the actual technology, and the paradigms which define the operating system and software.

Other features which will be depreciated include SELinux and PulseAudio, the bane of nearly every Fedora user’s existence. These technologies are “solutions” to entirely fictitious problems, and the former in particular is closely related to the same issues surrounding the PackageKit scandal. If unprivileged users are never given elevated privileges in the first place, then there simply isn’t any need for mandatory access controls – standard UNIX security methods are sufficient.

Debian Family

Red Hat is instructive. Though many of us would like to see it broaden its focus, the company remains rooted in the enterprise server and middleware markets. Canonical, in my view, should take a lesson from Red Hat and channel some of its energy into fewer markets, markets where it can thrive.

Fuji Soft has just introduced its first commercial bipedal humanoid robot that will see its official name and price unveiled early next year. For those who have tight purse strings, fret not – Fuji Soft maintains that their robot will be highly affordable.

Phones

What can we say about the Nokia N900, it is easily the most anticipated Nokia handset in quite some time. The Nokia N900 came out, officially, last week – November 2009 – and has so far been widely received as one of ‘The’ devices of 2009. Obviously, we’ve been covering the Nokia N900 extensively since we first got wind of it at Nokia World 2009 – and rightly so, it is one hell of a device, and completely different direction for Nokia. Read on after the jump to find out more about the device, its capabilities, and why it was so highly anticipated.

The Nokia N900 is a powerful smartphone with many options for customization and tinkering. It has a superb browser, and the multimedia features are hard to beat. The user interface, however, can be frustrating to navigate, and consumers who are used to their smartphone’s interface coming in a friendly, pretty package will likely be turned off by the N900. If you’re looking for something a little more intuitive but still customizable, check out the HTC Hero or even the Motorola Droid.

Android

Google unleashed its mobile OS Android in full force this year. The open source operating system, which runs on a Linux kernal, has gone on to power devices such as the HTC Hero and the Motorola Droid. The beauty of Android is that it is open source, meaning its literally a pleasure for developers to work with, and isn’t tied to anyone device in particular – essentially, any mobile phone manufacturer can pick it up and use it to its full potential.

Android is an open source mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. Various Smartphones based on the platform is already available in the market like HTC G1, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Samsung Galaxy, GW620 Eve, etc. However, the Android platform still has a long way to cover in the tablet segment. Meanwhile, various PC vendors like Dell, Archos, and IDC are preparing to launch their tablet PCs based on the operating system.

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Various other companies like GiiNii, Camangi, NEC, Moto, etc are also working on the Android-based tablets. The new tablets can differ in sizes, which will resemble iPod touch or MIDs available in the market. However, the success of these devices will depend on the prices, overall functionality and the consumers’ willingness to carry a connected device in addition to mobile phone.

It is assumed that the devices will have Google Talk, which replaces cellular connectivity. Hence, VoIP and other Google support could make a difference for the Android-based tablets.

Sub-notebooks

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project today provided a deeper glimpse into its XO-3 tablet, including concept shots and more features. The roughly letter-sized computer will now hopefully include a camera on the back to record video in a more intuitive way than the XO-1. The developers also clarify that founder Nicholas Negroponte’s desire for “no holes” would involve wireless power.

“Open sourcing the IHTSDO Workbench will make it easier for developers from around the world to work together to further develop these tools,” said John Gutai, IHTSDO’s chief technical architect. “It also means that organizations and standards bodies from around the world can use the same tools to maintain their own terminologies and coding systems, leveraging the investment that IHTSDO and its Members have made.”

This report is a great read for understanding how open source data and BI solutions are being adopted, but it also includes short list of recommendations for those considering open source. I also found the discussion on the difference between “community” and “enterprise” editions helpful in avoiding or at least understanding one of the common gotchas of open source — finding you have to pay if you want to unlock the more useful features.

If open source’s collective mission is to change the way software is designed and used, a goal like this would have more genuine benefit than almost anything else I can think of. The real dividing lines would be between what programs are worth using and which ones fall short — not which ones hew to a specific licensing model or were built under the auspices of a given social contract. In many realms, this has already happened: most people don’t care if a given CMS, for instance, is open source or not; they care if it fits their needs as a business. The next step will be to have the software makers themselves reach this stage — where they can consider open vs. non-open without it being a political issue.

I don’t know if that day will ever come, but it sounds like a pretty good goal to me.

Only a few weeks ago (December 1st 2009), Sequoia Voting Systems became the first major company of its kind (Voting Systems Manufacturers) to publish it’s source code openly for public download and study. You can read the following article for more information (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/topix/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091201006177&newsLang=en). The move follows an earlier disclosure made by the California based Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDF) which made available the source code of its Prototype Election Software in October 2009 (see: www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-source/).

We can say with some conviction that this indeed was the case in 2009. While we obviously do not have financials for all open source companies we can parse through the data that is available to prove our point.

The open source qooxdoo (pronounced “ku:ksdu”) software development framework, which leverages object-oriented JavaScript and enables developers to build rich Internet applications, became available earlier this month in a 1.0 version, developers of the framework said.

But we don’t have to wait and repeat the past. Thanks to design thinking and new tools and methods in ethnographic research, we now have a new model of innovation that is flat, open-source and dynamic.

Google

“There are forces aligned against the open Internet–governments who control access, companies who fight in their own self-interests to preserve the status quo. They are powerful, and if they succeed we will find ourselves inhabiting an Internet of fragmentation, stagnation, higher prices, and less competition,” Rosenberg wrote.

He also launches a clear attack on Apple, noting the iPod and iPhone range as examples of how closed technology can produce excellent short-term results but soon leads to a firm only being able to make minor improvements rather than an entire industry creating better products.

Mozilla

The Mozilla Foundation claims that Fennec, now officially launched as Firefox Mobile, will sound the deathknell for app stores because its browser-based experience will be so advanced as to make downloads, optimized for smartphones, redundant. The open source organization is releasing Firefox Mobile on Nokia’s new N900, Linux-based superphone, and it will come to Windows Mobile and Android early next year.

Databases

Even with all the drama surrounding Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun and critics’ concerns about its impact on Oracle’s open source database competition, Sun developers are still hard at work on MySQL. One of the fruits of their labors is the recent MySQL 5.5 milestone 2 development release, which introduces many new features to the open source database — some of which were originally intended for MySQL 6.0.

Releases

Songbird Logo Six months after the last stable release – version 1.2 (version 3 never got out of beta) the Songbird developers have announced the availability of version 1.4.2 of their popular open source media player. According to a post on the Songbird Blog, the 1.4.2 release, which appeared one day after Songbird 1.4.1, addresses a “UI glitch” bug in the release that “made mashTape and LyricMaster hard to use”. In addition to several bug fixes, the latest stable release of the cross-patform player focuses on improving device and format/codec support.

The new version includes more support for Java constructs like anonymous inner classes and nested classes, enhancements to annotations, which allow annotations to be added to imports, packages and variable declarations, and a more expressive and readable output from assertions.

Programming

Computer science must be at the center of software systems development. If it is not, we must rely on individual experience and rules of thumb, ending up with less capable, less reliable systems, developed and maintained at unnecessarily high cost. We need changes in education to allow for improvements of industrial practice.

The devices underpinning today’s communications networks grow increasingly powerful, in their speed, throughput, features and supported services. That’s great for users – but it presents a significant challenge for manufacturers.

The commercial embedded Linux market was created ten years ago when Jim Ready founded MontaVista Software. At the time, skeptics said Linux would never work for embedded development, it lacked key features required for embedded systems, and the performance wasn’t comparable to existing real time operating systems (RTOS).

The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. For society, what matters is that people should have access to news, not that it should be delivered through any particular medium; and, for the consumer, the faster it travels, the better. The telegraph hastened the speed at which news was disseminated. So does the internet. Those in the news business use the new technology at every stage of newsgathering and distribution. A move to electronic distribution—through PCs, mobile phones and e-readers—has started. It seems likely only to accelerate.

The trouble is that nobody knows how to make money in the new environment. That raises questions about how much news will be gathered. But there is no sign of falling demand for news, and technology has cut the cost of collecting and distributing it, so the supply is likely to increase. The internet is shaking up the news business, as the telegraph did; in the same way, mankind will be better informed about his fellow humans than before. If paper editions die, then Bennett’s prediction that communications technology would be the death of newspapers will be belatedly proved right. But that is not the same as the death of news.

One sensible use for a last year’s netbook is to turn it into a network-attached storage server. This allows you to store files on the hard drive, assign user groups, and access the drive over your home network. Most of the popular NAS applications — such as Openfiler and Nexenta — provide a few options for how you install the NAS software. You can load it up as a distro that actually takes over the laptop or as a client that runs in Linux or Windows. These open-source tools are similar to Microsoft Home Server and many offer a Web-based console to control the NAS from a remote computer, so once you set up the NAS on your netbook, you can leave it to sit idly next to your router and never have to even open the lid.

DRM

The hack began as an open challenge in this (translated) forum for participants to come up with a way to make ebooks published in Amazon’s proprietary format display on competing readers. Eight days later, a user going by the handle Labba had a working program that did just that.

Now, if you’re at all familiar with the Maoist Cultural Revolution, to compare that to those who are simply pushing for their own consumer rights on copyright issues or asking for actual evidence of the need for increasingly draconian copyright system changes, is downright ridiculous and insulting. No one is acting as a revolutionary, demanding “free access” or any sort of “Maoist” revolution. To make such a claim is pure ignorance.

I’m a Canadian. Dr. Ficsor’s ‘An invitation to Canada to join the international community by ratifying the WIPO Internet Treaties’ is one of the more insulting, and incorrect documents that I’ve perused over the years. So many errors, where oh where should I begin? How about the start?

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2 Comments

The XO 3.0 is another disappointment. Nice device, perhaps a cool e-book reader or teaching *device*. But it has long lost even a veneer of being a LEARNING computer.

Without a REAL keyboard, the XO is just another device that trains children to be consumers of other people’s content. It cannot be used to create any real content or let children learn how to solve their own problems by programming a computer. This is a necessary and critical requirement in order to capture their own digital destiny.

I suspect the keyboard is a significant component of price and and a reliability issue, but without it all you have is a souped-up interactive TV.

The criminal enterprise known as Microsoft finds itself embarrassingly exposed in the courtroom, for the IRS belatedly (decades too late) targets the company in an effort to tackle massive tax evasions

A look at some of last week's patent news, with imperative responses that criticise corporate exploitation of patents for protectionism (excluding and/or driving away the competition using legal threats)

Vista 10 to bring new ways for spies (and other crackers) to remotely access people's computers and remotely modify the binary files on them (via Windows Update, which for most people cannot be disabled)

As Microsoft admits billions of dollars in losses just days before Vista 10 is pushed as a 'free' upgrade, there is no concrete sign that financial recovery is imminent, for the bigger cash cow (Office) suffers a similar fate